I originally wrote this in late 2020 and thought it might be time to revisit and give my thoughts an overhaul. But it seems all of what I wrote three years ago still applies. So I just corrected some spelling :-)
I like to share some thoughts about some things I come across. This is heavily influenced by what I do and learn. So take everything you read here with a grain of salt.
document
future-you will thank you
and while you are on it: share your wisdom
why not share your documentation? Maybe others come across the same problems and are happy to come across your insights.
You do not have to be perfect
some tend to say "But I can not share this ... it's not presentable". If you think so do it anyway..
There will always be hopefully polite (see "be polite") people around to give you feedback.
You can always iterate on it later. But:
iterate
always try to revisit your stuff and improve it. Apply what you learned. Current-you is sometimes impressed (not in a positive way) about how past-you solved problems. This is normal.
You do not have to do everything yourself
be realistic about the time you got on your hands. Keep it simple.
There is nothing wrong with setting up your own GitLab, Sentry, Jenkins, Confluence, Jira, MySQL, Mailserver, or WordPress Instance on-premise and/or adding Docker Kubernetes to the equation. There is a lot you can learn while doing that and I can not recommend enough learning about this stuff. But do not do it because the on-premise / community edition is free and the hosted edition costs five bucks/month.
But if you want to run this stuff in a production environment open to the public internet you have to consider that you got to keep all of it up to date. Updating your system with security patches alone can eat up a lot of your precious time.
a few tips on how to save time for more important things:
Consider using hosted Gitlab / Github / Sentry instead of spinning up your on-premise installation
If your domain isn't web apps: consider doing a static website instead of a self-hosted WordPress Site.. or go with a full-service site provider if your honor allows for something like that
Do you really need your own Jira, Confluence for your scale?
contribute
if you ask a question on StackOverflow because you are stuck on a not optimal documented product. Why not share what you learn and try to improve the original documentation?
if you got a new feature or improvement why fork and start your own thing? why not try to contribute and improve the original?
be polite
in earlier years (some call them "the good old days" but I tend to believe that we are always currently living in what we will later call "the good old days") we had a thing called "Netiquette". This is still a thing today and albeit more and more unknown it seems to be more important than ever before.
For most of us "Netiquette" comes naturally... but some should give it a read (google search)
Learn, code, repeat
you'll experience a thing like "I'll never get that". Don't give up.
Learn, code, repeat.
Eventually, it'll become more clear and you will get it.
If not: maybe it was not meant to be understood.